My pet peeves M$ won't fix
(or Window$ Woes)
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The cost. It's no wonder the
U.S. is falling behind technologically. And when is the
last time have you've actually heard of a scientific
breakthrough that was more than just something new to spend your
money on?
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Bloat. As soon as chip
designers have developed faster technology, MS has already
devised a way of squandering the extra performance doing
something useless in the background or adding more decorative
elements to an already overly complex GUI. Thanks to this
mindset, which has been mimicked by Apple and the Linux
community, there has remained an underclass of people who find
computers perplexing and even a waste of time. Maybe they
have a point. Can you really say that what we do with
computers today is more advanced than it was when DOS was king?
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the prospect of sending
humans to the moon has become increasingly economically
prohibitive. When a scientist is running calculations to
optimize some new rocket propulsion design, his or her computer
is spending half of its processor time just making sure things
look pretty on the screen.
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In Vista and all subsequent versions
of Windows, Microsoft has eliminated
the 'up a folder' or 'parent folder' button from the Windows
Explorer toolbar. Have you figured out their idea of
Post-XP folder navigation? I haven't.
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The registry, viz. 'Add/Remove
Programs'. This is possibly the root cause of the Mac's
continued existence. It seems to me that if Apple Mac
software apps can consist of a single file, then M$ could have
come up with a Windows OS based on the same tenet. Ask
yourself why your Windows PC gets slower and slower and slower
over time. The answer is the Registry.
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IE7,8,9,10,11 - occasionally certain folders
will not open from the Favorites menu. Others have posted
this problem on the Internet, but there does not appear to be a
known solution. I can at least report that the problem
does not usually persist in a new tab when it is opened.
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The last several versions of Excel
have lacked a browse button when selecting the default file save
location. Word and most of the other Office applications do have
this browse button. One would have thought that this oversight
would have been fixed in Excel 2007 or 2010, but it is still
conspicuously absent, giving rise at least in my mind, to the
belief that core Office code has been reused for the last 15 years. How can Microsoft produce more secure office
applications by doing this? All they appear to be doing from
version to version is rearranging the user interface. If users
want better security and usability, then how can they be
satisfied with features that move around from version to
version? They've taken things out of logical, hierarchical menu
systems and laid them out in haphazard ribbons of unintelligible
icons which obscure
valuable screen real estate.
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The icon in the upper-left corner of
every application, which if clicked displays the options to
Move, Size, Restore, Minimize, and Close, will occasionally
change to a white rectangle. This occurs when the application is
extremely busy. This behavior in itself is not problematic, but
it does call attention to the fact that despite Microsoft's
claims 15 years ago during the transition to 32-bit computing
that their NT and Windows 95 Operating Systems used
'Multithreaded Multitasking'. Poppycock! If you so much as click
a mouse button while the aforementioned icon is a white
rectangle,
then you risk being given the option to send an error report to
Microsoft. Joy! If you've ever used a Sun
Workstation, you'll have experienced what Windows has never been
able to achieve--True Multitasking. By this I mean a smooth
transition between an application that you've just made busy to
another application which is idle and ready for your input.
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